Friday, December 27, 2013

But I like to think of it as transforming the nature of our
musical relationships with each other. Opening it up. More fluidity rather than
fixed band members and instruments. I am both sad about the end of the band as
it was and excited about the possibilities of creative directions for the
political messages we want to convey and express. But I want to reflect on what
it meant to be in/part of a band, more specifically an Asian feminist hardcore
punk band.

For me and Shasha, we’d both been attracted to and involved
in punk scenes, played in other bands. I’d been in an anarcha-feminist riot
grrrl band with white grrrls called Hysterror, then it was renamed Mad Bitcher.
But before that band, I remember answering an ad online for a guitarist when I
was 15 and it was two white cis-boy punks and when I met up with one of them in
person, they were surprised and had thought that I was gonna be a guy and
seemed quite disappointed. Later, they never made an effort to even have one
jam with me. That was my first experience of sexism/racism/ageism in almost
being in a punk band.

I’ve always felt quite alienated in the punk scene in
Auckland. I wasn’t into drinking, smoking or taking drugs. But I was attracted
to the politics of punk and the spirit of rebellion and resistance in the
lyrics of the punk bands I was listening to: Crass, Zounds, Propagandhi,
Choking Victim, Contravene etc. I got into more political punk music through pop punk which was being played all over the radio around the early 2000s with Blink 182, Good Charlotte and Green Day. Feeling like a misfit, their music was easier to connect with than the mainstream poppy love songs at the time. With the war on
Iraq and invasion of Afghanistan happening, I got involved in activism and
there’d be punks on the demos. The first person who introduced me to anarchism
was a punk kid at a protest to free Ahmed Zaoui. I started going to local all
ages punk shows and became friends with some of the more political punks, the
crusty anarcho-punks. In general, the bands that were around in Auckland
weren’t all that political then and pretty much all white men. I think the
Coolies and the Quims were the few women-led bands that were around but the Coolies
disbanded not long after I got involved. I still remember their set on International
Women’s Day in 2005.

Despite the assholes I came across in the punk scene, the
gigs and music helped create some sense of community and solidarity among young
people getting into punk or activism at the time. They provided a social space
for political discussions hanging out outside in the middle of the night
breathing second-hand smoke in between bands. Those were the days of police
raids of shows with pepper spray, sometimes arrests, lots of questioning, and
people were beaten up on demonstrations. These run-ins with the law enforcers
exposed me only partially to the extent of police violence and brutality.
Though these were shitty experiences, it strengthened a sense of solidarity and
community for those of us that were politicised.

The more my analysis became shaped by feminism and
anti-racism that challenged the class-centrism that universalized white men’s
experiences of capitalism, the more disillusioned I became with the dominance
of drunken and sober sexism, homophobia and racism. It wasn’t really my community
and could never really be. Even though I’d been associated with the punk scene
in Auckland for maybe 9 years now, when we started MPM, it felt like we were by
default on the outside, trying to work out where/if we fit in. We had good shows,
bad shows, fucking amazing shows and played with fucking awesome bands we
really admire. But that sense of community and connectedness wasn’t really
there.

The experience of being in a band beyond the ‘punk scene’
has meant a lot to me. To be able to play with other people of Asian diasporas
with similar politics and be angry and scream from our standpoints was
something I never got to do before. I could write lyrics that my bandmates
would get. If I was in a white person-fronted band, it wouldn’t work for them
to be singing it. Music is so personal/political. Not just the contents of the
lyrics, but also the form, the per-form-ance and the process of creative
production. Being in a band is like being in a relationship with all your
bandmates, you have responsibilities, negotiations, conflicts – but there’s
something really magical when you’re jamming and the sounds, rhythms just gel
and move together (like sex!). You lose yourself in the music and forget you’re
the ‘individual’ that neoliberal ideology convinces you you are.Some songs can
take ages to perfect but with “Migrant and Refugee Solidarity Song”, we jammed
it out in one session, we just did it together without even really speaking.
It’s not like you just hear the song, but you feel it and make it at the same
time with the whole of your being. The sense of collectivism in the creation
process and during the performance where everyone has an equality crucial role
to play that is really different to say, rapping alone to digital beats, spoken
word or making a speech. It’s that interdependency and collectivism of being
part of something beyond the sum of individuals involved is so missing in other
forms of social interactions. This aspect of being in a band is amazing, and
the post-performance highs can be epic, leaving you buzzing and unable to
sleep. Then there are also the lows and I’m glad I was warned about them early
on.

We encountered a lot of challenges as a band, some were
fairly predictable but still disappointing. The DIY music scene, largely being
apolitical don’t tend to try to understand us or what we’re about. Like the typical
migrant situation we had to learn and understand their (sub)culture to navigate
it but there’s rarely any consideration of if that should also maybe happen the
other direction. We can fill a token slot, make the punk scene appear to be all
accepting, multicultural and pro-feminist, but never get our politics taken
seriously unless we kick up a fuss about it and then we’re expected to do the
educating on privilege and complicity 101. Gets super tiring.

We’ve been silenced and had our agency over
self-representation denied ‘cause some white folks didn’t get a joke about
‘reverse racism’. We’ve had other people of colour attack us for naming
whiteness, as if that’s racist. We learnt that an influential person in the
music scene was a perpetrator of gendered violence and have cut all connection
with them. We’ve had to defend ourselves
for not wanting to play shows with homophobes. We got a lot of shit and
defensiveness from people who just didn’t get it.

We’ve also had invaluable support from our friends, flatties
and allies. Without them we couldn’t have done what we did.

What’s interesting is that as a band, we have connections
and identify with so many different communities and movements – feminisms,
anti-racism, anarchism, decolonization, queer and trans liberation, migrant
communities, animal rights, anti-capitalist student movements, and yet never
neatly fitting into any of those movements and often alienated from our own
communities. This did give us opportunities to play to very different audiences
but for most shows and festivals, it never felt ‘at home’. Except maybe our
first show that we organized – “Decolonise the Mic” as part of the Decolonise
Your Mind hui. Best audience ever!!

Being in this band with all the previous and existing band
members before the disbanding has meant so much to me. It made me feel less
alone in the fight in the struggles for liberation and equality. We reached
people and met people in ways we wouldn’t have otherwise met, and got to know
people in ways we could only do through music. We’ve built new relationships
with people through performing, organizing and just being/having a presence.
Those are the connections that matter and will last beyond the band.

I still feel partially connected to punk because it played
an important role in radicalizing my perspective of the world. As a genre of
music, we really owe it to the African-American brothers who formed the band
Death before any white punks bands existed. What I really like about punk is
that you don’t have be good at your instruments, you can still make music and
say things in your own way without feeling like you haven’t met some sort of
professional standard. And I’d fucking love to see more feminists of colour
pick up a guitar and start a band. Maybe then can there be a community of us. I
think we all just want to feel like we belong somewhere and it’s especially
hard where you can never feel fully comfortable in any established communities,
and at this point, I know it’s not a place I will ever “find” but a place we
have to make for ourselves.

I think music has a special place in social change and revolutionary
movements. It’s certainly been part of altering my political consciousness. And
we will continue to create, just not in the same way or form. For us to create
in a world where all that is important is constantly destroyed or under attack
is a way of fighting back. To create is to demonstrate that the systems of oppression
can never destroy or control our hearts and minds. Your voice, your expression,
art, performance, words are important, especially if you’ve been taught to hate
yourself – for being a girl, queer, trans, non-binary gendered, non-white,
indigenous, an immigrant, a refugee, unemployed, working class, classed as
“crazy”; if your love and care for all animals and the earth has been
trivialized or ridiculed. When you speak, make music, write or create, it’s a
political act in itself.

You don’t have to wait for someone else to come along
and speak your thoughts and experiences for you, that day may never come if you
don’t do it yourself. That’s why we existed.

Monday, October 7, 2013

On Monday, October 15th 2007, more than 300 police carried out dawn
raids on dozens of houses all over Aotearoa / New Zealand as part of
‘Operation 8′. Police claimed the raids were in response to ‘concrete
terrorist threats’ from Māori activists. What initially started with 20
defendants resulted in the trial of four – Taame, Emily, Rangi and Urs –
which concluded on 20 March 2012.
Six years later, most of the charges have been dropped, Rangi and
Taame are out on parole, Emily and Urs have almost finished serving
their home detention, but the impact of these raids on those arrested,
raided, their whānau and communities continues.

Kaupapa

Never Forget is about:

Commemorating the raids and acknowledging the pain they caused.

Understanding that these raids were part of a long history of colonisation and dispossession in Aotearoa.

Building solidarity with Indigenous people struggling against colonization globally.

Creating dialogue and alliances between tangata when and tauiwi ethnic minorities.

Discussing how tauiwi ethnic minorities can actively support Māori in the struggle for tino rangatiratanga.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

For a while now, some of
us part of Young Asian Feminists Aotearoa have been having discussions about
decolonization what it means for us as Asians and tau iwi people of colour to
be living on stolen land. If you’ve seen that banner “Asians Supporting Tino
Rangatiratanga” at protests, that’s us!

Before I start, I just
want to say that I’ve been feeling a bit conflicted speaking at this forum
after experiences that made me think long and hard about the barriers for tau
iwi people of colour to engage with issues of colonization in Aotearoa
especially when the conversation is controlled and mediated by Pākehā and the
normative discourse is framed by biculturalism. I really want to challenge the
view that this is just about Māori and Pākehā. In that framework, tau iwi
people of colour are either treated as honorary Pākehā or non-existent in this
country. By tau iwi people of colour, I mean settlers and migrants who are
racialised, generally of non-European descent. We also exist in this country,
and particularly this city. In many ways, we are also complicit in the colonial
relationships and structures set up before, during and after our arrival. I
want to explore what it means for us to support Tino Rangatiratanga and how
they might be similar or different to the role of Pākehā.

I want to start off with answering the question
of “Nō hea au?” Where am I from? Although that’s usually quite a loaded question
white people ask me all the time for being visibly Asian, where I’m from is
significant for this discussion. Unlike tau iwi who are Pākehā, my ancestry is
not in Europe… but this land known to English-speakers as China, a massive
country now imagined as a superpower or a source of cheap labour. Specifically,
I was born in Tianjin a port city not far from Beijing. This city, my hometown
has a colonial history of occupation by 8 different nation-states from the 19th
to 20th century, but western cultural imperialism is still happening
today through the importation of dairy products for example. My grandparents
still remember the days of Japanese invasion and occupation characterized by
torture, mass murder, pillaging and burning villages to the ground as well as
vivisection - that is - medical experimentation, on Chinese people. But people in
my ethnic group, known as the Han Chinese, have been both colonized and
colonisers in different times and places. Taiwan, Tibet, Urumqi and Singapura
are some places currently under Han Chinese occupation and rule. I support the
tino rangatiratanga of the indigenous people of those lands as well, although I
can’t say I understand the context that well having never been to any of those
places. I’ve grown up most of my life in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa where racism
and xenophobia against Asians in the 90s was pretty visible and as in your face
as an egg in your face walking home from school and your parents working low
wage jobs because they can’t speak English. I didn’t start really understanding
the history of this land until my later teen years, which I didn’t learn
through the school system but through education on the streets, at hui and
protests. So I’m supporting tino rangatiratanga with this history.

So with this history in
front of me, I think the distinction between tau iwi people of colour and
Pākehā becomes important in the ways we support tino rangatiratanga and the
role we might play in the movement to decolonise. This category extends to
other migrants and settlers who are not Pākehā, including those who are
indigenous to other lands, migrants or refugees who have been dispossessed by
war, occupation or rampant capitalism as well as those who were privileged
enough to migrate as a skilled migrant. So this is quite a broad category of
people with a lot of internal inequalities based on class, religion, gender and
ethnicity. I don’t claim to speak for all tau iwi people of colour, but I do
think it’s a useful category to name non-Pākehā groups that are also racialised
and experience racism in this colonial settler society but are not Māori.
Whatever the case of how and why we’re here, our visa status or citizenship has
been granted to us by a colonial settler state that stole the land and
established power to make decisions of who does and doesn’t have the right to
be here. We weren’t invited here by tangata whenua but
allowed/tolerated/permitted to be here by the thieves of their land, so
immediately the relationship is fairly fraught because we’re part of a settler
population that further entrenches the dispossession of tangata whenua.

At the same time, while
many of us have certain privileges as settlers here, racism and xenophobia can
make it hard to access appropriate housing, employment and allows the mainstream
to treat us as secondary citizens or residents or otherwise as ‘illegal
aliens’. Or we might be economically included but socially excluded in the
imagination of the nation-state. There are different kinds of racisms that are
specific to each of our different ethnicities, but being tau iwi here means
that we’ve come into a system of colonial relationships and a country where the
wealth is based on colonisation and domination of tangata whenua.

With this fraught
relationship in mind, I think it’s important to recognize the divide and rule
tactics used and circulated that shapes relationships between tau iwi people of
colour and Māori and our perceptions of each other. Biculturalism and
multiculturalism often get talked about as opposing visions of cultural
politics, but neither of which really question the centrality and dominance of
Pākehā culture. Biculturalism tends to shut non-Pākehā tau iwi out and
meanwhile multiculturalism gets used to undermine tino rangatiratanga (see
Brash’s Orewa speech). Token knowledge of Maori culture or reo sometimes gets
used by Pākehā to indigenize themselves and further exclude tau iwi people of
colour, to ‘one-up new migrants’. I see this as a form of cultural
appropriation for other racist agendas.

Migrants of colour and
Māori get pitted against each other in this way as if anti-racist liberation is
a zero-sum game. Often migrant knowledge of these issues or of Māori culture
have been mediated by racist stereotypes in the Pākehā media then translated
and filtered through in our languages. We’ve rarely had opportunities to build
links and alliances with each other without Pākehā people mediating those
spaces. So we’ve had to build and organize those spaces ourselves and want to
continue building those links and sorting through the tensions that might exist
between the goals of tino rangatiratanga and migrant justice. In YAFA, we’ve
have looked at how immigrants of colour in Turtle Island or what’s known as
Canada have bridged those tensions and it seemed like the conversations there
have been happening on a wider scale and stronger links have been forged
between migrant justice and indigenous struggles. I’m really interested in how
that can be done here.

Many of us want to make
sense of our place in this and want to stop participating in ongoing
injustices.

My main message today is
that there are tau iwi people of colour supporting tino rangatiratanga despite
the barriers. And it’s not necessarily a new thing. We were there on the hikoi
against the Foreshore and Seabed bill, we were there in solidarity when the
anti-terror raids happened on October 15th 2007 and throughout the
court process, supported the protests against the deletion of Māori seats in
the creation of the supercity, marched against asset sales despite the xenophobia
and fears of foreign (i.e. Chinese) ownership as if land in this country isn’t
already in non-Māori ownership.

More tau iwi people of
colour need to play a part in supporting tino rangatiratanga otherwise by
default we’re playing a role that is complicit and maintains the racist
structures of this colonial settler society. Beyond having a common oppressor,
I think it’s important for tau iwi people of colour to build meaningful
relationships with tangata whenua to tautoko the movement for tino rangatiratanga
and mana motuhake from our own cultural frameworks. By questioning our own
complicities and seeing through the divide and rule tactics of the colonial
settler system, as tau iwi people of colour, we can seek strategies to disrupt
and resist settler colonialism, because there can be no justice for anyone on
stolen land including migrants without achieving tino rangatiratanga and mana
motuhake for tangata whenua. I imagine and hope that in the not too distant
future, we can have these conversations and discussion on the terms of tangata
whenua and in te reo Māori rather than te reo Pākehā where mātauranga Māori is
centred rather than marginalised or tokenised.

We’re still figuring out
our role in the struggle for tino rangatiratanga and have a lot more to learn
but we want tangata whenua to know that we are here in solidarity and other tau
iwi people of colour to know that it’s important for us to also engage.

Some of us have some
projects planned as well: one is a zine about people of colour settlers and
complicities in colonialism, which is aiming for transnational conversations
between and within colonial settler societies including Aotearoa, Australia and
Turtle Island. Shasha Ali, who is also part of YAFA is also planning a
commemoration for the October 15th raids to involve performance
artists and musicians for shows in Poneke and Tamaki-Makaurau. Get in touch if
you want to be involved.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

For a long time now, I've thought a lot about the issues with talking about the oppressive stuff in my family and culture in a white-dominated context that constructs non-western cultures as more oppressive, inferior and generally more backward or authoritarian. Having worked with young women from Asian, Middle Eastern and African backgrounds coming out of family violence situations, there's quite common response of internalised racism. In these cases, resulting from trauma. This dilemma between challenging orientalist and racist ideas that present non-western cultures as more oppressive and challenging the very real oppressions that affect me directly in my own family is a really hard one to straddle and difficult to know how to talk about it publicly without painting my family or all Chinese people as sexist or homophobic, or more so than the dominant Pakeha culture.

I recently came out to my parents as queer, not directly using that term but indicating that I'm not heterosexual. My parents are also Christians, my mum doesn't just think it's sinful to be sleeping with women but that I have a mental illness and I need 'treatment'. She claims that according to the internet that 70% of homosexuals are fake and can be cured from such disease. She also keeps repeatedly asking me whether I think of myself as male and pressures me to grow my hair long and dress more feminine. After I came out, I went home the next weekend and she had taken out all these old photos of me from intermediate school where I had long hair and wore dresses just to remind me that I am a GIRL. I don't think I can even begin to try to explain what genderqueer means. I asked, so what if I do think of myself as male and she said that's also a mental illness and that I'll need to be cured from it. It's not normal. Apparently if we didn't leave China, I would not be queer, it's a white people thing.

On the other side, if I'm having issues in my queer relationship with my white partner the discourse my mum uses is that same-gender relationships just don't work and aren't supposed to work. Find a (Chinese) man, get married and have babies like she did. You don't have to love him to begin with but you will grow to love him. Like my mum did, apparently. It's like if you're queer and there's problems in your relationship it's because you're queer and the solution is to be heterosexual. If you're Chinese and there's problems with your family it's because Chinese culture is just more conservative or backward and the solution is to distance yourself away from it or try to assimilate into Pakeha culture. It shouldn't have to be like this.

I think there's a lot of issues involved and I don't really know where to start to begin articulating them. There are tensions between ethnic loyalty under conditions of racism and eurocentrism where your culture/people is considered more homophobic or sexist if you talk about those kinds of oppressions in among people of your ethnicity. They then become marked as "cultural" oppression. When this oppression is talked about in Pakeha culture they're considered "structural" oppression, because Pakeha apparently don't have culture (but have structures, lot of them, hierarchical ones). I don't know how many times Pakeha people have expressed this "I don't have a culture" sentiment. As Marilyn Strathern said, "the nice thing about culture is that everyone has it". It's just fucking invisible to you because you're part of the dominant culture. Then also with diasporic experiences, your family is usually your first point of understanding of your cultural background and however your family operates becomes a characteristic you might attribute to 'your' culture. I can see that slippery slope towards internalised racism when violence is added in there in the context of wider societal racism that makes your culture seem more backward anyway. But that distinction between "cultural" and "structural" oppression is interesting, with "cultural" oppression as a problem with this thing called "culture" and for that oppression to stop, the culture must change. With "structural" oppression, it's the structure that has to change. Maybe we need to talk about "structural" oppression within all cultures or use "cultural" oppression universally including the dominant one because oppression justified and exercised through cultural hegemony especially in the dominant culture.

I hate that super annoying framing of having to choose between anti-racism and queer feminism. In a dominant white context it just makes it fucking hard to talk about. How do you address these forms of oppression that may be culturally specific in a diasporic context without adding fuel to racism and colonial feminism? How do you unlearn internalised racism when that's been a response to trauma? How do you explain this shit to white people without feeling like you're providing evidence that their culture less problematic and being a 'victim' that needs them to save and protect?

At the axes of multiple structural yuckness, we gotta figure out a way of combating oppression intersectionally without undermining other shit that's important to us. That context of Pakeha cultural supremacy that adds a dense fog to the rough terrain that's already hard to walk and navigate. But we can't let it get in the way of where we need to go. We have to figure this out together.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Hey all, I wrote the below in response to someone asking me to write about an aspect of my journey to anti-racist work... hope there is some value to you in reading this. Thanks heaps :-)

~~~

So. Yesterday I was explaining to a white person
about my choice to stay as tanned as possible. How it is a conscious decision
on my part in response to the status given to pale Asian women. In Asia, there are
heavily marketed whitening creams, lotions and operations, as there
is a belief that paleness (or "whiteness") is connected to status and
conventional ideals of beauty. Many advertising campaigns and films and other
media will feature pale Asian women, or purposefully employ
part-Anglo/Saxon/Celtic Asian women to feature in said media.

Darkness of skintone still plays into preconceived
notions of savagery, primitivism, animalistic tendencies, and other exoticisms.
Lightness of skin still suggests purity, pristine beauty, innocence, and thus,
being appropriately feminine.

These are generalisations, from conversations with my
educated, informed radical queer friends. These are associations people make,
despite their reluctance to. In the last few years I have been called
"Pocahontas", "Warrior queen", "Amazon woman",
and "Tribal Priestess" from these friends. People have also
guessed my nationality as Pacific Islander, South or Central American in
initial interactions. I am 100% Vietnamese. I don't mean this to take away any
burden of history from black or brown people in my community or reading this,
and I am not expressing these anecdotes as complaints, merely observation for
analysis. I also apologise if I come across as if I am appropriating any other struggles
that are not my own.

In my conversation yesterday I explained to my white
friend that my choice now to be as dark as possible was one choice of many
that I have made over the last 20 or so years, of thinking about race, and in
particular, my own journey with my racial identity. I am 31 years old. I
explained that up until my early 20s I made a conscious effort to stay
as pale as possible, I was a teenage goth, I stayed indoors in Summer,
only went to the beach at night... and how that was a conscious denial of my
Asianness. I was aware that I was disassociating or attempting to detach from
my brownness, my other-ness - these conditions that brought me emotional
and physical pain as a teenager growing up in the white oceanside suburbs of
Sydney. I was ashamed to be Asian, and I tried to hide it in many ways. I am
now trying to dismantle that shame.

My choice now, besides to get healthy doses of Vitamin
D, to stay sunlit and brown, are a reply to the conversation I started as an 11
year old. I am now here and proud and fierce.

I have recently started to accept my skin and body as
part of who I am, as I realised that I disconnected from these states as a
child and teenager as both these physical attributes attracted physical, sexual
and verbal abuse from those around me. I am attempting to reclaim my self.

I write this, aware that this is still the beginning
of my epiphanies, processing, acceptance.

This is one example of many, many decisions I have
made around my intentional anti-racist politics, decisions made from the age of
11. I could write about those decisions, but feel there are too many to
recount. The main aspects is that I alternate between empowering People Of
Colour in POC-only spaces (workshops, lectures, shows, activism, direct action, community
work, refugee work, work in developing countries, journalism) and
educating White People and White Spaces (social work, youth work, Critical
Whiteness workshops, Privilege workshops, talks on Gentrification and
Displacement, talks on Responsible Methodology for NGO refugee services,
etc). I have spent years in POC-only countries doing work, and then return to
Anglo-Saxon countries to do other work (and usually to save money to fund the
other experiences and travel). There has been (exhausting, draining,
alienating) years of serving a predominantly white community, and then
making a conscious decision to take a break from that and serve intentional
POC spaces. This is a continual ellipse, however the older I get, the more
focussed I am on giving time to POC-only communities, to asylum-seekers, to
immigration and workers' rights.

At this point I am writing a book for
Asian-Australian teenagers, will go on another Race Riot zine tour
later this year through the south of the States, and hope to seek more work
supporting immigrant communities in some way. I am living in a
predominantly white country at the moment, with an almost entirely white
radical queer and punk scene around me, which is an aspect I wrestle with
daily.

*** I hope this has not offended anyone, as I
understand talking about skin colour and shades as an Asian person expresses
ALOT of the choice and privilege I have in society. I mostly hope that I have
been able to contribute something to the reader. ***

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

One
of the reasons Leeland moved away was because of the ghosts. Pakeha
ghosts to be precise. Less pakeha, less ghosts – went the plan.

White
seduction, golden maps and hemisphere migration had sacrificed his
ancestral tongue. He got an English one instead – complete with
Kiwi twang and mumble. It had served him well. It also meant pakeha
ghosts took a liking to him. Leeland often wondered if he had known
his mother tongue, would Chinese ghosts speak to him too.

Leeland
felt the Maori spirits stirring. That wasn't a special thing about
him, everyone could feel them, coudn't they?

Especially
today. Waitangi Day. Day where the pakeha got prickly, and the
'others' were confused and vulnerable to pakeha angst in the media.
Day where Papatuanuku tugged at her children up through the soles of
their feet and gripped the crowns on their heads.

Leeland,
like many men, excepting his father, didn't cry much. Not because he
refused to, but because feelings that rode with tears, didn't make it
up far enough from his chest to his eyelids.

The
karanga was like a magnet that made all his tears feel like they
would spill not just out his eyes, but out of his skin. He could
feel all the passed before, running their fingers and breath all over
the tiny hairs on his body as they were called onto the marae by the
haunting, realm-crossing call.

Maori
ghosts didn't talk to him, they didn't need to. Their stories were
ready on the lips of their descendents, written in tears on so many
parchments, and all online now too. It was in the soil, and chanted
by trees, rivers, lakes and mountains if you knew how to listen.

It
was the pakeha ghosts that had so much to say. Their descendents
that had silenced their song, sought to erase it. The tales,
ordeals, sacrifices and crimes of their migration journeys and new
settlements barely six generations back. Time doesn't mean much for
ghosts. And they found Leeland's tongue. Made him sing their
mournful ballads, and listen to their stories.

At
first it terrified Leeland. Then he was angry.

Leeland
couldn't speak to his own living grandmothers as they had different
languages in their mouths and ears. Yet these pakehas ghosts,
demanding in passing, as in life, followed him around until they'd
spoken and sung enough to move on. Everyone needs an audience.

So
he watched. Used this ghostly gleaned knowledge to supplement in
living conversations. Ghosts spoke with their bodies, or the shapes
and whisps of their bodies. Spoke emotion like that. Leeland tried
to stitch the holes in the living pakehas with his words. The
pakehas were hurting, dead and alive. So like school yard bullies,
played it out on the backs of Maori. And Maori, dead and alive,
continued to struggle.

Against the battering rams of Westminster
Law, privatised prisons, poisonous health care and lobotomising,
heart-dehydrating curriculum, the people of the land continued. And
the earth sung to them quietly in caress, balm to wounded souls.
Leeland knew the land would never stop singing to her children. And
those songs made him weep.

You
had to pick a side.

You
couldn't live with your eyes and ears open, and not realise what's
going on. But once you picked that side, you realised it wasn't
about sides. It was about remembering. The memories that live
through bodies, and words, and actions, and refuse to be erased or
re-written.

And
the bully stomped on and threw its toys.

There aren't really sides to understanding. Being quite short seemed to help Leeland. Easier to
not get caught in tall poppies heads being chopped off.

Standing
underneath the rhetoric, propoganda, denial and hot-air, to see where
it's all leading.

For wounds to heal, the thorn must be removed; not
ignored and 'moved on from'. Common sense really. Unfortunately
commonsense was not so common these days.

In
time Leeland realised it was merely a price for living on this
contested lands. Though he wasn't a pakeha, to Maori maybe they were
all colonial settlers. White, yellow, red, black, rainbow,
off-white. So he tried to pay his part, taxes and rent perhaps.
Someone had too. The price was too great and could never be repaid,
but maybe the act of trying spoke in volumes.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

On this global day of action in solidarity with Idle No More, members of Young Asian Feminist Aotearoa (YAFA) went inside the
Canadian Consulate and Trade Office in Tamaki-Makau-rau (Auckland) to demonstrate our
support for indigenous rights everywhere.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

A woman in Delhi was
brutally raped and beaten ON A BUS. The woman has just died as a result
of her injuries. There is a lot to this story so do check out the links
below.

Today the world finally learns of her name - RIP Jyoti Singh Pandey.

In light of her story as well as the many unnamed unsung women victims
there, here and worldwide, a group of young Asian women with the support
of Shakti, are organising a silent protest to mourn in solidarity and
extend aroha and support to those still in grief and disbelief over this injustice.

Why a silent protest? Because words cannot express the pain and rage we
have been carrying in our hearts since the loss of our sisters. Our mana has been broken!

Immigrant women of colour and young people in Aotearoa New Zealand seek
the tautoko of all members of New Zealand society, from all walks of
life, to join us for a silent protest in honour of the women victims and
their families. Join us as we rise against rape culture and
collectively build hope and strength.

In respect of Indian
custom, wear something white as a colour for mourning. Black scarves
will be distributed at the event for people to wear as masks symbolising
our "silence". You may bring posters and placards to "speak". Silent
protest will go for 30 minutes, after which speakers from the community
will be invited to share a few words.

About this blog

This is a blog dedicated to radical social change from a section of the "Asian" tau iwi population in Aotearoa. We wish to create more dialogue and space to talk about issues that are specific to our experience. It’s about opening up a space in which Asian feminists in Aotearoa can speak and communicate our specific and diverse experiences, to counter the dominant white feminisms and left-wing politics, to challenge colonialism, racism, sexism and all forms of unjust social hierarchy. To engage in decolonisation, to create understanding between all oppressed people, to support each other, to inspire solidarity and organize collectively for a better world.